losing fish

[greenacres21]

I am fairly new to the salt water world...but have a few tanks...all going well in them, except my 120 gal..is having some problems. First it looked like ick on my cow fish, then the 3 angels looked like they had a coating of white on them, but everyone else fine. I started warming up the tank & then added ick meds for a week. Looked better, but cow still had spots. I then started antiobiotic for the bacterica infection. After a week, no change, did a 25 % water change 3 days ago. Woke up this AM, & 2 of the angels are dead, but the light blue tang was dead too. Never looked sick, also the lemon peel doesn't look great either. HELP!! I have no idea what to do. THe levels are fine in the tank. I still have a Picasso, cow, wrasse, angel, lemon peel, yellow tang, and a puffer in there. I am scared I am going to lose them all. What do I do, when the levels are showing the water is fine????? PLEASE help me.

[schmnr]

Its probably ick, sorry for your loses.

[tangmang23]

What I like to do in Non Reef tanks is slowly start to lower the salinity. This is called hypo salinity. shoot for around 1.009 as the lowest. Fish can survive in "brackish" water but corals and inverts cannot. This works well with treating external parasites like ich and velvet. Ich is not as common in saltwater and often times velvet is mistaken as ich. If your tank was cold, that could very likely be the causes of some of these issues. Lower salinity also reduces the amount of work fish need to do to process nutrients etc in the saltwater, this means that the stress on the fish is reduced. The coating of white to me sounds like a fungal infection. Now i wasnt able to save my 3 tangs that were coated in a fungal infection because i didnt find that the temp was the problem until it was too late. Warm water should help this clear up and with the lower salinity I would hope you would be okay. This should also work in preventing the illness transferring to other fish in the tank.

If you read though our club forums there are a few threads floating around about troubles with fish. I just recently went through something similar and found it was related to cold water. My thermometer failed being electronic and was giving me some way false readings. Deff check all your levels again, keep the water warm and low saline for a while and maybe even use some pimafix. Its all natural so it shouldnt mess with any tank levels. Turn off your skimmer during this treatment period of pimafix, but turn back on to help keep water clean. Also stay up on feeding, it may help to use a vitamin C product to soak there food, if your not already doing so. Garlic is also a good idea.

good luck

[schneijt]

Welcome to LARK, and I'm sorry to hear of your troubles. It seems that a number of us have been having some fish health issues lately.

Can you post all of your readings from your test kits? Also, what kind of equipment are you running on the problem tank and what are you feeding the fish?

Like Nick said, I also suggest enriching the food with vitamin c and garlic. Garlic enhances the taste of the food for your fish, and it also provides them with an immunity and health boost. The vitamin c also helps with the immunity of your fish.

I wouldn't treat the tank with anything unless I knew for sure what I was treating for. If you can, please post a picture of a sick fish if you have one--pics are invaluable when we're trying to help someone with a sick fish identify what's going on and what action to take. Hyposalinity (slowly lowering your specific gravity to 1.010) may be beneficial for your tank, but only if there are no inverts and/or corals in there. However, ONLY do hypo if you have a refractometer to measure your salinity/specific gravity. If you're using a swing-arm or floating hydrometer, they are not accurate enough to do hypo, as you need a very precise instrument (aka: refractometer) to get your salinity down to 1.010 without accidentally getting the salinity too low and possibly killing fishes from water that isn't salty enough.

Ok, I know I typed a lot, and maybe you didn't understand it all... But, please let us know if you need further information/help with something, and we'll do our best.

Best of luck!
Joe

[Reeftanker3295]

I dont know if im right here but dont cowfish let off a toxin when they get scared that can quickly kill most things in the tank?

[OLDETOWNENORTHPETS]

Cowfish do let off toxins.

[schneijt]

I didn't know that. Huh, you learn something new every day... Here's a quick Google search I did regarding cowfish and toxins. It also references that they're prone to "whitespot" or something like that...

http://www.practicalfishkeeping.co.u...ead.php?t=1742

[pogodzib]

Welcome to LARK!

There are a lot of different saltwater diseases, but only a few that are very common. However, poor water parameters can cause many diseases to show up. You livestock may have been killed due to the diseases or they may have perished from the treatment methods. As Joe said, the first thing to do before treating fish for anything is to figure out what the fish has so they fish gets proper treatment. Secondly, once you figure out what the disease is, you should do some quick research to figure out what is the best method for treating the disease. There are a ton of medicines out there that say they treat a disease when in reality they don't work, esp. when it comes to reef safe ich medicines. In the mean time, I would add carbon (and possibly another small water change) to try to pull and medicines and toxins out of the water so you know that you're starting from scratch with a tank with good water quality.

Please post some pics ASAP so we can let you know what we think you have. Without pics, diseases can be tough to correctly diagnose.